The Prado Museum is “retouching” its masterpieces due to climate change

The Madrid art gallery has joined forces with the well-known international NGO WWF to visually explain the disasters that rising temperatures would bring.

It seems silly, because in truth a degree and a half (or 1.5º) is a low figure, but in terms of global temperature, #LoCambiaTodo. And I'm not using it as a hashtag because I can, which I can, but because it's the tag used by the Prado Museum and the international NGO WWF (the one with the cute logo with a panda bear) to try to raise awareness about climate change. And for any art lover - or anyone who takes pride in enjoying a good exhibition - it should work.

It was during the last Climate Summit in Madrid, about which so much was said but which, as such, were rather few. And that is despite the fact that the paintings they have chosen to carry out the idea are by four masters: Velázquez, Goya, Sorolla and Patinir. Let's reassure the pipol, because obviously the original paintings are intact and everything has been done digitally, although the truth is that a sticker or a 3D projection would have been incredible, but that costs a lot of money and climate change is not so important to spend more money, we suspect.

Javier Solana, the president of the Royal Board of Trustees of the Museo del Prado, said that it was “an excellent way to convey to everyone, and especially to the younger generations, what is really at stake in this fight against climate change.” “We want to take advantage of the opportunity to send a message of action to the whole world through the universal language of art,” said Juan Carlos del Olmo, Secretary General of WWF Spain.

To do this, they contacted the advertising agency CHINA, which carried out the creative development under the supervision of museum specialists. But the outreach work has gone further, continuing on social media, since those 1.5º would be the turning point that scientists and experts have set as a point of no return: if that temperature rises, the consequences are unpredictable.

The only hints are, like the case of 'Philip IV on horseback', the portrait that Diego Velázquez made of the monarch and that in this campaign appears, like the Earth if the tables do not turn, with water up to its neck. But beyond more or less inspired and ingenious wordplay, the truth is that with that degree and a half more "the sea level could rise up to a meter, forcing millions of people to move because their towns and cities would disappear," explained the NGO.

Sea levels could rise by up to one metre, forcing millions of people to move because their towns and cities would disappear.”

WWF

Something similar to the proposal to raise awareness through Francisco de Goya. The Aragonese genius saw how the two young protagonists of his costumbrista painting 'El quitasol' changed their happy and loving faces for faces full of sadness and despair given that they had become "climate refugees", given that "there would be extreme weather phenomena and more than 1,000 million people" would have to move.

As an awareness campaign it is very good because I am already convinced, but there are still a couple of them missing, which, coincidentally, are related. The first is surely the easiest to think of because it is obvious, but not for that reason less serious. The NGO and the Prado agree that, if the temperature were to increase by just one and a half degrees (it is important to remember this), “droughts would increase, threatening rivers and crops in the world”, leaving Joachim Patinir's 'The Passage of the Styx' without water.

And, in the last case, 'Children on the Beach', by Joaquín Sorolla, would have fun surrounded by dead or writhing fish, given that at +1.5º "the acidity of the sea would rise, affecting large fish populations and up to 90% of coral reefs could disappear." As I said, it CHANGES EVERYTHING. Without a hashtag, yes, but with capital letters.